Bringing UC Berkeley into the ‘Intel NUC Age’

Intel works with hundreds of universities and colleges around the world on everything from research to recruiting to consultation. These are symbiotic relationships with technology being the star and students (and Intel) benefiting. Last week, Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) computer labs converted hundreds of old systems to hundreds of Intel® 3rd gen Core™ processor based “Next Unit of Computing” (Intel® NUC) devices with Intel® SSD 530 Solid-State Drives (SSDs) – a robust Intel solution for the growing needs of one of the nation’s top engineering programs.

The Intel NUC is the latest in desktop computing – small, powerful and full of potential. When paired with the latest mSATA Intel SSD and mini PCIe Intel wireless card, this bundle can provide an incredible amount of power-efficient performance in a box that fits in your hand. There are versions of Intel NUC that include support for triple display, Gigabit Ethernet, 16Gb of memory, Intel® vPro technology and multiple USB 3.0 ports all in a package that you can tuck just about anywhere. These are all features that the students at Berkeley’s engineering labs can use to the max.

The bundled Intel SSD 530 Series drive offers world-class solid-state performance and reliability for innovative small form factor platforms. The 530 Series can handle even the most demanding client applications with throughput of up to 540MB per second – all of this in an extremely small mSATA form factor. Berkeley’s students will not have to “wait for the lag” but rather turn in those assignments faster than ever!

“Back in 1998, these labs were transformed with what was then breakthrough technology from Sun Microsystems, the SunRay thin client,” said David Culler, Chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley. “That was in the days of the NOW project and shortly before the transformative Intel Millennium Project – which remains a landmark advance in bringing computation in the sciences onto clusters of SMPs, or multicore today. We believe this 3rd gen Intel Core based NUC bundle provides the kind of efficiency, simplicity, and robustness at the leading edge of the technology curve that our lab needs today.”

The Intel Higher Education group is a corporate resource which facilitates relationships between Intel and top research institutions around the globe for faculty and student programs. Also click here for product information about the Intel NUC and here for Intel SSDs.